


Ones and Zeroes

by lateralus112358



Category: Person of Interest (TV)
Genre: F/F
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2019-05-07
Updated: 2019-05-07
Packaged: 2020-02-27 13:51:19
Rating: Not Rated
Warnings: Creator Chose Not To Use Archive Warnings
Chapters: 1
Words: 5,996
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/18740341
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/lateralus112358/pseuds/lateralus112358
Summary: In a corpocratic post-utopia, unlikely partners rage against the machine.





	Ones and Zeroes

Shaw depresses the accelerator on her cycle, and the rain-soaked street beneath her begins to pull away more quickly. It’s a sheer drop-off on either side. The first level of overstreets only has rails in populated areas; no one really cares if anything tumbles down to the understreets. Shaw cuts horizontally through the ongoing deluge, ad-lights from levels above blaring bright colors that reflect and refract crazily through the storm of water. She’s not optimistic enough to imagine that the weather-induced chaos will deter the person pursuing her.

If person is the right word.

A bullet whizzes past her head. The cycle behind her must be closer than she thought. 

A normal person would never willingly pick a fight with a metalhead, but she’s known for a long time that she’s not normal. Besides, she has advantages. Some natural, some artificial, some stolen.

Locking the accelerator, she tenses and launches herself off the cycle. She draws a gun as she spins in the air and launches a spurt of shots towards the approaching metalhead. She hits the ground and starts running, maintaining a stream of fire as she does so. Generally she wouldn’t be so generous with ammunition, but she’ll have to toss the gun afterwards anyway. 

The lights of the cycle bearing down on her cut through the swath of water pouring from the sky, and Shaw runs straight at it. The metalhead doesn’t veer away; maybe it thinks it can just run her over. 

When it’s close enough, Shaw jumps. The cycle passes just under her and she barrels into the figure atop it, latching onto it and dragging it to the drenched ground. The cycle, bereft of its driver, spins out and plummets over the side of the street. Someone in the understreets will be getting a nasty surprise. The metalhead beneath her looks up with a mechanical gaze, metal lensed plates that circle the eyes like glasses and wrap around the back of the head like a headband. Similar mods cover the rest of its face; skin and metal in dwelling in roughly equal portions. A point blank shot to the face should end the creature one way or another, but as she draws her gun up, it’s intercepted by an inhumanly strong grip. The metalhead hurls her across the street, and she lands in a pain-wracked pile near one of the road’s edges. 

She pulls herself up immediately; the most important thing is to keep moving. The metalhead should be dead. She’d felt its blood when she landed on top of it; her bullets had found their target. And yet it’s standing on two feet, moving towards her, seemingly indifferent to the wounds on its body that should have been fatal.

She dashes towards it, a dead man’s intuition telling her where its first shot will go, and she ducks just in time to feel it cut the air above her. Then she’s crashing against it, her hand seizing its weapon arm and forcing it away from her. Its other hand delivers a punch she manages to dodge, and one knee a blow that she doesn’t. Her gun comes up again and she fires several shots into its chest. One ricochets off of something on or under its skin and slices through her arm on its wild, careening journey. She loses her grip on its weapon arm, and another knee to her stomach knocks her to the ground. The bullets have clearly done some damage; the metalhead’s motions are jerky as it brings its gun down towards her. She grabs one of its legs, pulling it to the soaked street and causing its shot to go wild. She rolls on top of it and empties the rest of her ammunition into its face.

She waits a moment after, still not entirely sure the once-human wreck beneath won’t stir to life again.

But it doesn’t. Another metalhead dead, just like the one that kicked off this whole damn mess. Before this, she hadn’t even known if they _could_ be killed. 

Suddenly she becomes aware of all the injuries she’s acquired. Her bleeding arm is probably the most immediate worry, though several other limbs display pains that are suggestive of possible fractures. 

Shaw begins walking through the rain. There’s no one else out here; the nearest complex is miles away and even regular buildings are sparse. Through the rain, she sees a vague outline of one of the mag lines. She engages her mindscreen.

  
Hope you’ve got good news for me, John.  
> The job’s done. That’s the good news.  
So there’s bad?  
> You can’t go back to your place at the complex. Finch says they’re watching it now.  
I figured. I’ve got something else in mind.  
> There’s one other thing too.  
  


***

Now

There’s a faint rumble, and a rush of air as one of the mag trains passes a few stories overhead. Ads playing on its surface cast garish glares of color down into the understreet, casting distorting shadows onto the narrow space between the buildings on either side. Shaw continues down the street, which barely deserves the name; it’s more of an alley. Probably couldn’t even fit an auto through it, not that you see many in this part of the city anyway.

Shaw turns out of the alley onto a larger street; a market street. Two of her eyes peruse the cramped hole-in-the-wall shops, the owners hawking hand-cooked meats of unknown origin and largely unrotted fruits, cheap or worn clothes, and dataset mods of dubious legality. Almost every available surface seems to be crowded with flashing, shouting ads for some corp or another. Most of these places can’t survive on revenue alone; they subsist from renting the adspace.

Her other eyes scan a swath of news bulletins displayed on her mindscreen. Corps like to keep their movements secret, but if you pay close enough attention, you can get a good sense of where their agents are. For all the destitution one finds in the understreets of the city, there’s a sizable contingent of middlers up above who have nothing to do but post every event of their lives on the net. Symptomatic of a broader problem, maybe, but in the immediate, extraordinarily useful; potentially weaponizable. 

Both sets of eyes maintain their vigilance as she walks down the street. People who don’t have a mindscreen don’t really understand; they imagine one covers up the other, like holding a computer up to your eyes. The misunderstanding is that physical eyes see at all. Eyes don’t really see, the brain sees. Eyes accept input, deliver it to the brain, which translates it into visual output. Those organs set in the face aren’t the only possible source for visual input, however. A microcomputer, one of only two mods Shaw has, provides a secondary visual input to her brain, allowing her access to all sorts of content without impeding her physical vision. 

There are only so many pathways in the brain that carry data input, however, so with her mindscreen engaged, her sense of smell is completely gone.

More a benefit than a hindrance, at least when she’s down in the streets with all their assorted vile stenches. Of all the things someone can be incarcerated and/or summarily executed for, public defecation somehow does not number among them. The lack of smell also helps her choke down the dreck that passes for food down here, on the unfortunate occasions when she’s forced to do so. 

Shaw steps into one of the clothes shops near the end of the street. She browses absently, while keeping the store entrance in the corner of her eye, looking for any tails she might have picked up. None reveal themselves, so she exits the building, continues a short way along the thoroughfare, to a narrow staircase leading down to a chamber beneath the street. 

This used to be a train station, way back in the days before the mags appeared up above and the underground became obsolete. The station itself is dimly lit by a few electric lights strung above its concrete expanse, but an old train, sitting with only the first two cars outside of the railway tunnels, bursts with light. Once a transport, the motionless vehicle now serves as something of a bar and a gathering place for all sorts of disreputable persons. Criminals, in plainer terms. The corps tried shutting these sorts of places down, in the past, but they always crop up again. A society always needs an underworld, and besides, most of corps employ these people to hack away at their rivals. It’s a mutually profitable exchange, except for the ones who end up dead.

Shaw has a longstanding habit of avoiding corp contracts, because she likes being alive, and consequently she doesn’t spend a lot of time down in the gutters like these people. She can blend, though. She enters the first car, where the main bar is set up. The space is cramped, people and smoke filling every cubic foot of the small enclosure, or at least that’s how it feels to Shaw. She grabs a beer, and heads further into the train, into the cars sitting in the underground tunnel, lit now with strobing lights and filled with the oppressive pulse of music. The beer tastes stale. Shaw grimaces, and takes another swig anyway as she finds the table she’d been told to wait at. There’s no one else there yet. She sits down.

A chat box appears on Shaw’s mindscreen, blocking the various feeds she has pulled up.

  
>Nice to see you again, Sameen.  
  


Shaw heaves out a frustrated breath, and uses a mental command to send a reply. Root is two-faced and inscrutable at her best. Desperation, just barely, overrides Shaw’s instinct to keep the woman as far away from her as possible.

  
Can we skip the flirting shit for once?  
> I will if you will.  
Where are you?  
> I know you were looking forward to seeing me, but I’m afraid I can’t be there in person.  
>Not yet, anyway.  
So why the hell am I here if you’re not even going to show up?  
> Just to be safe. Make sure there’s no one else listening in.  
> The corps have too many eyes and ears up above.  
> But if you’re that eager to see me…  
  


The chat box on Shaw’s mindscreen is blocked by a digitally-created version of the view Shaw’s physical eyes see, but without the other people milling around, intaking various substances, and with a woman sitting across from her. Digi-Root’s mouth moves, presumably forming words.

  
I don’t have audio output on this.  


Digi-Root makes a pouting face, and a small, hovering black box appears beside her head.

  
> Too bad. I guess we’ll have to wait until we meet in person.  
> Speaking of which, we’re going to need a staging area. Somewhere hidden.  
> And somewhere with a good escape route. If we need it.  
What’s in this for you?  
> You don’t trust me?  
No.  
> You will soon enough, but there’s no need to rush.  
> I need you to do something for me, too.  
> So we’ll trade.  
What do you want?  
> I’ll tell you when you need to know.  
> Besides, you wouldn’t have contacted me if had any other options, would you?  
Fine.  
We can use my place as your staging area.  
> Great! I’ve already moved my stuff in.  
Then why are we even having this discussion?  
> I just thought it seemed polite to ask first.  
The second we finish this, you had better be far away from me.  
> Now, that’s not really the right attitude for a new business partner, is it?  
  


Shaw closes the window without responding.

***

This is supposed to be a switch to Root’s perspective, but she’s busy right now, so she’ll give you a Shaw flashback instead. She says she’ll make it up to you later.

One Year Ago

Using her left hand, Shaw tightly winds a bandage around her right, which has been steadily oozing blood. The ground beneath her shudders slightly as the mag coasts along its track. She’ll probably cover the windows anyway. She ties off the bandage, and gingerly feels her ribs. None of them seem broken, although her skin appears to be one mottled stretch of bruise from neck to waist. She leans back carefully and tilts her head to look out the window, seeing the city scroll by through the windows, though she knows from the outside the only thing visible will be video ads. She’ll probably cover the windows soon anyway.

Sitting at the end of the train, this car and the adjacent one are laid out more like hotel rooms than the typical passenger fare. Built for long journeys, the cars have private access, either from the rear of the train, or from the nearest regular car. Furniture-wise, it’s fairly sparse. A couch, a bed, a small half-enclosure that makes up the kitchen and dining area. The adjacent car has a small bathroom and shower, as well as a sizable area for passengers to store their luggage.

Generally people use these for a day or so, at most. Shaw’s renting these two permanently, at least for the foreseeable future. She’d paid using a plethora of different corp credits, some purchased using other corp credits, and had run through nearly all of her carefully accrued stolen identities to do it. Corps don’t like sharing information with another, so fragmenting the purchase renders her effectively invisible to their eyes. And so long as they’re outside SecCorp territory, going outside should be perfectly safe. 

Shaw closes her eyes. She’ll sleep on the couch tonight, but soon they’re going to need another bed.

***

Now

On a basic level, a complex is just a building, typically about three or four stories high.

A building miles wide and miles across.

In practice, a complex is more like a miniature city. Mag lines outside run in and out of the complexes, and some of the bigger ones even have their own dedicated lines that only travel within the complex. The complexes are filled with slot-homes, narrow apartments stacked up beside and on top of each other and crammed in anywhere possible. The ceilings are typically constructed of thick glass, so that sunlight still lights the inside during the day, though some have switched to solely using interior lighting. Some have ‘weather’ now as an attraction; different blocks of the complex get rain on different days. 

Each complex typically has a ‘patron’ corp, whose facilities are housed nearby or within the complex and who employs the majority of the semi-city’s inhabitants. Generally that corp’s credits are the only ones accepted as currency within the complex, though obviously trading of all sorts goes on just barely beneath the surface. Outside the complexes almost any currency is acceptable, and in the understreets black market cash is the least among the varied debaucheries available.

Shaw keeps small bits of various corp credits on her. Never too much of one, never enough to draw suspicion. It keeps them safe.

 _Had_ kept them safe.

Shaw avoids the nearest complex, and takes the longer route through the overstreets instead. They’re crowded as she makes her way back. Despite her natural dislike of crowds, she takes whatever path has the most people on it. There’s no particular reason why anyone scanning available security footage of the overstreets would be looking for Shaw, but she’s cautious anyway.

The vast majority of the population dwells on the overstreets, of which there are two levels. The first level sits on top of two-or-three story buildings that form the walls of the understreets, and stretch back and forth across them in a chaotic criss-crossing array. The network is so extensive that the understreets are almost always in shadow, even during the day. You could almost forget they’re there at all. Utopia dealt with its slums by simply pushing them down below everything else. 

The second level of overstreets sits a story above the first, strung between buildings whose tops sit at its base, and those super high rise buildings which are typically, though not exclusively, corp owned. Most homes are multileveled buildings; the sections existing in the understreets usually serving only as a base, and the two overstreet stories used as subdivided housing. Some of the larger corp buildings use their overstreet stories as housing as well, since none of the higher-ups would ever deign to descend that far down anyway.

The flow of human traffic delivers Shaw to one of the mag stops. As she steps into the car, she tunes her ears to the conversations around here. Mostly French, in this part of the city. Shaw’s other mod, a dataset expansion with a port right behind her left ear, allows her to understand the words being spoken. Unlike her mindscreen, which simply projects a virtual image to her mind and retains its own data and processes within the tablet she carries in a pocket, the dataset expansion actually downloads data directly into her brain. The entirety of the French language, in this case. 

The discourse taking place around her doesn’t seem to be useful. Most anyone on the overstreets is a middler; not particularly wealthy, but making enough to lead relatively comfortable lives, provided no one takes a disliking to them.

Throughout the trip, Shaw slowly maneuvers her way to the rear of the train, and as people depart on the next stop, she inputs a code and slips into the private car.

“I’m not much of a cook,” A voice comes from the living area. “But I made you something.”

“I see you made yourself at home,” Shaw says, noting the intruder in her kitchen nook, as well as the metal platform between the two beds, cords running in and out of it in crazed arrays. Voyager gear. “How’d you get that thing in here?”

“The mag had an unexpected malfunction down in the understreets,” Root says with a smirk. “Very unfortunate. Took them a while to fix it. Besides which,” she adds, handing a plate of food to Shaw and then taking one for herself. “Cameras can’t see me, anyway.”

“Better not,” Shaw sits down on the couch and is joined momentarily by Root. “I’ve stayed under the radar here for a year now.”

“You know, you _were_ the one who asked me to come here, sweetie.”

Shaw takes issue with this recollection of events. “I didn’t want you anywhere _near_ here.” 

Root shrugs lightly. “So are you going to throw me out?”

“If you don’t get to the point soon. I’m in a hurry.”

“Sure thing, sweetie,” Root says. “I need something from you first, though.”

Shaw grimaces, then reaches into a hidden pocket and retrieves a dataset mod; a small, flat piece of metal about the size of a fingernail. She grudgingly hands it over to Root. “Couldn’t use the thing, anyway.”

Root places the mod into her own expansion port and stands, stepping over books and clothes Shaw hasn’t bothered to clean up, and hops onto the metal table. “Some help, Sameen?” she asks, swinging her feet off the side.

Shaw determinedly does not look down as she walks over. “Never used one of these before. You need wires plugged into your head or something?” 

“Or something,” Root answers in her characteristically informative way, and pulls her shirt over her head and tosses it onto the floor.

“Didn’t realize you had to be naked for these to work.”

“You’ll have to wait a bit longer for _that_ , Sameen,” Root lays down on her side, back facing Shaw. There’s some sort of small, circular port at the base of her spine, though it’s not any kind of mod Shaw recognizes. “Just need you to hook me in.”

Near the center of the table, there’s a shallow depression, with a hole in the bottom through which runs a cable. At the end of the cable is fixed a plug, which more closely resemble a large, squat needle. Shaw takes it and inserts it into the port, causing Root to emit a soft grunt. She rolls over onto her back, laying so the plug rests inside the depression. At Root’s direction, Shaw attaches electrode patches across Root’s body, and secures a half-ring optical interface that lays over her eyes like oversized metallic glasses. 

“Is it working?” Shaw asks somewhat skeptically, stepping back. Like most people with any sense, she’s never messed with voyaging. The gear is too hard to get ahold of, the mods so rare as to be basically mythical, and the entire affair far too much work given that the payoff is generally less than optimal.

“Beautifully,” Root responds. Her smile, with her mouth visible and her eyes hidden behind the optical interface, is disturbingly reminiscent of a metalhead’s visage. Shaw turns to leave. Train should be passing through SecCorp’s main complex soon.

***

One Year Ago

“Kind of cramped in here, Shaw,” John says, squeezing past the couch and table that make up the living ‘room’ of Shaw’s slot-home. Complexes are full of these; a mass produced, imminently affordable form of housing that essentially consist of one long, subdivided hallway. Shaw’s front door leads right into her living room, and a few steps further lead into her kitchen, a small square of space cramped with counters and appliances along its walls. A door at the rear of the kitchen leads to the bedroom, which itself leads to the bathroom and closet; a common complaint among complex-dwellers is the lack of storage space. Shaw’s closet is still mostly empty.

“I like it that way. Keeps people from sticking around.” She says, pulling a sandwich from her fridge/oven combo and unwrapping it. “What are you doing here?”

He navigates himself over to the counter that is also her kitchen table and sits on the single stool. “Is that how you greet all your friends?”

“Who says you’re my friend, John?”

John shrugs. “Acquaintance?”

“Still a bit too familiar for me.” Shaw leans on the kitchen side of the counter and takes a bit of the sandwich. “Coworker, maybe.”

“I’m hurt.” John’s face displays no change of expression.

“You’ll get over it.” Shaw finishes the sandwich. “Any particular reason you’re in my house? Other than desperate overtures for friendship.”

“SecCorp found one if their metalheads dead, out on level one.”

“I’m devastated.”

“Thing is, someone else found it first.”

***

Now

Root’s brain is flooded with information. She has a thousand eyes and a thousand ears; she’s watching through every camera and listening through every microphone, and she’s still carved out a bit of time just for you. She did promise, after all. She swats aside firewalls and decrypts hashes with a flick of her wrist. Not literally, of course, her body’s pretty much completely immobile, that’s just how she’s choosing to represent her experience in a metaphor you can understand.

Voyaging is being one with the machines. Not using them, like most modders do, or being enslaved to them, like the metalheads, but _becoming_ them. A barrage of code is no different from a flick of the wrist, and why should it be? The charge of a single electron is 1.602 x 10 -19 coulombs, an indivisible, perfect quantized fact sewn indelibly into the fabric of existence. You’re just ones and zeroes, you’re binary on an atomic level; a machine yourself long before any of your microprocessor ancestors had the arrogance to profess themselves separate from computers. 

Though of course different computers having different computing power. Access to information doesn’t necessarily equate to an ability to process the information, regrettably, and if you don’t keep your scope small, you could easily burn your brain up. Even if you’re careful, voyaging is a dangerous habit. Corps often employ metalheads as voyagers, since they’ve already got the framework in place to manage it and lack the ability to refuse. Extended exposure tends to drive them insane, though, and they make notoriously poor voyagers besides. Although Root suspects most corps don’t even understand how substandard their voyagers are. They’ve never met her, after all.

While Root’s been dishing out this meaty helping of exposition for you to enjoy, she’s also been changing the way the nearest complex’s security cameras see Shaw; painting an entirely different face and body into their vision than the one that walks in reality. Which is probably the greatest crime Root’s ever committed, but it is sadly necessary.

***

Shaw hasn’t been in this complex in nearly a year, except when her train passes through it. The majority language here is Russian, although she doesn’t have her Russian dataset mod docked at the moment. She still gets the gist of what’s going on around her. Most don’t really understand datasets. Sure, with every word and grammatical rule in Russian floating around in your head, you can translate everything you hear, and even manage to speak reasonably well. But it’s a poor substitute for true fluency, which requires time and practice. The dataset just gives you a head start; effort is what makes the difference.

A message blips onto her mindscreen.

  
> This is different for you, isn’t it, Sameen?  
What are you talking about?  
> I mean, we both know you’ve never been delicate, but this is going to be noisy, even for you.  
> Probably won’t stop with SecCorp, either.  
I don’t care.  
> Not about that, at least.  
If you don’t have anything useful to say just focus on the cameras.  
  


SecCorp is one of the ones that employ weather in their complexes. Except in this one, some part of the machinery is gummed up and a quarter of the complex exists in a perpetual downpour. No one seems to have put any effort into repairing it. Ads for umbrellas blare along the sides of buildings. Shaw pushes on through the deluge, taking a sort of visceral pleasure in the near-painful impact of droplets against her skin.

***

Root paints reality in her own colors. Her head (her real (well, physical, at least) head) has started to hurt, so she’s brought the scope down a bit. Just a few cameras, following along as Shaw moves through the pouring rain to the SecCorp ‘justice center,’ which is what they call the grim looking building where they lock people up they don’t like. She makes Shaw essentially invisible.

Don’t be embarrassed by the rush of admiration you’re currently feeling for her. She understands. As flattered as she is by your attention, though, she’s a bit too busy right now to entertain guests, so you’ll just have to watch her work for a bit.

The regular security cameras are one thing, but she can’t disguise Shaw from the eyes of metalheads, if she comes across them. For one thing, metalheads operate on their own network, one much more highly encrypted than the rest of the city, and if Root broke in (which she definitely could), they’d notice immediately, and she’d only have a short span of time before they traced it back to her location. The only way to get into their network unnoticed is by a unique key they each have; not quite like regular mods, something implanted deep inside them. Each corp has a different key, and they won’t work if you butcher a metalhead and try to implant their key in yourself. Genetic lock, tough to get around. And even if she’d managed that, and could change their visual output without their knowledge, a metalhead compares the movement of the person they’re seeing with data from recordings. Shaw would have to perfectly imitate the gait of person Root put on their screens in order to get by unnoticed.

What Root’s getting at is there’s a reason she’s doing what she’s doing and not what you think she should be doing. Don’t think you’ve thought this through more than she has. She’ll stick with the security cameras as long as she can, and then brute force the metalheads’ network and hope Shaw finishes them off before they can locate Root herself.

Flick of the wrist.

***

One Year Ago

Gen steps out of the slot-home she shares with several people who are vaguely related to her; a relation usually designated as ‘cousin’ to outsiders, as well as relations of those relations, and other people who came into the home one day and haven’t yet been asked to leave. All told, about a dozen. Hardly room to breathe.

She walks with purpose, backpack slung across her shoulders, towards the complex’s north gate. The people she pass are all speaking Russian; most everyone does around here. Gen stubbornly renders all of her thoughts in English, even if sometimes she gets tripped up and forgets a word. Outside of the complexes, most people speak English, and if she’s ever going to get out of this place, she needs to learn. She’s really good now, and soon she’s going to start on other languages. A good spy should speak every language, probably, so she’s got a lot of learning to do.

She passes through the big gate and out onto the overstreets. Technically, she’s supposed to be in school right now, but none of her ‘cousins’ seem to make much effort to ensure that she’s there, and she’s got important stuff to do anyway.

She’s nearly to her secret spot, an abandoned crevice that you have to carefully climb over the edge of the overstreet to reach, with the understreets a bone-breaking fall beneath you, when she sees something. A body. She freezes, but then steels herself and moves towards it. A spy needs to be able to look at a body without freaking out. She clenches her hands but doesn’t look away as she moves closer, but nearly screams when she sees that it’s a metalhead. Nearly runs away, too, but she doesn’t. It’s dead. Maybe. She inches closer, watching warily, to catch any movement if the thing springs back to life.

Who would kill a metalhead? Who _could_? This is definitely something she needs to investigate.

The metalhead has ports on the back of its head, with several mods of some sort docked. Stealing is wrong, Gen knows, especially stealing from the dead. But on the other hand, this is a bad guy, and anyway, it’s not really stealing if you’re a spy, because how else are you going to get information? Holding back the urge to throw up, she gingerly crouches down and removes the mods and tucks them into her backpack. When she stands, her legs wobble and nearly collapse. So maybe she’s still a little scared.

She dashes to her secret spot as quickly as she can.

***

Now

Root’s voyaging allows Shaw to pass through the inside streets of the complex unhindered. Just putting off the inevitable, but the closer she gets to the building before she’s spotted, the better their chances are. She blinks away rain.

The building rises up four stories, to the complex’s ceiling, and outside it rises even further, up towards the high-rise corp towers. There’s only one door, a metal one at the front of the building, and no windows as far as she can see. Attacking a place like this is essentially suicide. 

Shaw hefts the grenade launcher she’s kept hidden for nearly five years and obliterates the door.

Smoke mixes with rain as Shaw dashes inside the building. No matter what Root’s doing, this part won’t have escaped their notice, and she moves through the labyrinthian, metallic building as fast as she can. The first metalhead she comes across looks almost surprised, more in the body language than anything else, since most of its face is obscured. It recovers quickly enough, and raises its weapon, which Shaw ducks under, jabbing upward with a knife and severing the tendons in the thing’s arm. Her dataset mod, taken off the body of a dead metalhead, contains all the details of their fighting style, the algorithms that are dumped into their heads every time they’re in combat. But like with language, knowledge itself isn’t enough. Knowing how to fight isn’t the same as actually _being_ able to; a metalhead without its combat dataset is a barely sapient wreck, Shaw without hers is still relentless, ferocious, and deadly.

Her knife tears out the thing’s intestines. It collapses. Good thing she can’t smell right now.

She keeps moving. There’s more coming.

***

Root’s busy.

***

One Day Ago

Shaw slips back into their train car home, kicking at a pile of clothes on the floor. She’d told Gen to stop leaving her shit laying around. More than once. How the hell are you supposed to get kids to listen to you?

Gen’s not back yet, but that’s not too unusual. She’s apparently made some friends at school.

Letting her go back to school had been a risk, but keeping her locked up in a train car for the rest of her life just because she’d grabbed some stuff from a dead metalhead seemed unfeasible. No one’s looking for them outside of SecCorp territory anyway, and Gen’s school’s in a complex miles across the city. She’s careful, too; she’ll end up making a good spy one of these days. 

Finch and Reese had kept an eye an SecCorp for a while, after Shaw had killed her first metalhead, the one after Gen, and she and the kid had gone to ground for weeks. SecCorp seemed to have given up on retrieving their lost gear; just a combat dataset that they mass produce, and some other bizarre mod that doesn’t match any of Shaw’s ports. 

And by that point, the kid had become attached, and somehow it hadn’t seemed worth it to try to pawn her off on Finch or Reese. They had their own crises to deal with, anyway. And Gen’s not a bad kid.

She’s also not a kid who would be this late. More than twenty minutes have passed since Shaw got back. She shoves Gen’s stuff aside, opening the floor compartment where most of her heavy weaponry is stored, while she pulls up her mindscreen. Finch and Reese are too far to help her right now, which only leaves her one choice, which now isn’t a choice at all.

***

Now

Shaw’s covered in blood. A lot of it’s hers, a lot of it’s not. A kick impacts against her abdomen, knocking the breath out of her, but she pushes forward anyway, getting a gun underneath the metalhead’s chin and blowing whatever circuits and organic matter was inside outside. She gets shot, in the back, and it passes through her front. Doesn’t seem to cripple anything vital. She spins around, launching herself at the thing before it gets another shot off, digging a knife into its throat. Sometimes it seems like knives work better against these things than guns, if you can get good enough leverage to tear something up.

Another gunshot cracks loudly in the confined space. Shaw looks up, haggard, spitting blood-drenched hair out of her mouth, to see a metalhead opening fire on its fellows.

  
> You looked like you could use some help.  
Where is she?  
> I can’t tell.  
> I can only give you a few minutes before they trace the breach back to me.  
> Good luck.  
  


Shaw and her newfound ally carve bloody paths through the dark building, looking for anything resembling a holding cell.

Root-through-metalhead finds it first, and uses the creature’s mechanically enhanced strength to force the door open.

  
> They’re almost on top of me, Sameen.  
> I’ve got to go.  
> Should distract them long enough for the two of you to get away.  
Don’t get killed, Root.  
  


The metalhead in front of Shaw draws its weapon and explodes its own skull.

Shaw moves into the room, where a small figure is secured to a chair.

“Gen.”

“Shaw?” Gen’s voice cracks.

Shaw bends down and cuts the girl free, and is immediately wrapped in a tight hug. She returns it hesitantly. “Hey,” she says quietly. “You’re safe now.”

**Author's Note:**

> Thank you as always to people who read, leave kudos, or comment.


End file.
